For nearly 90 years, the lodge at the Al Bahr Mount Laguna Shrine Camp survived all of the fires that threatened the area.

Not anymore.

The lodge, built in 1925 by Shriners with their own hands using wood felled right there off Sunrise Highway, was destroyed by the Chariot fire Monday afternoon when flames leaped across the road driven by strong, erratic desert winds.

“Behind us is the remnants of 116 cabins,” Shriners official Donald Wierman said Tuesday morning. “There are maybe a dozen cabins left. It’s absolutely heartbreaking.”

Directly across the highway, a 930-square-foot cabin owned by the San Diego chapter of the Sierra Club also was destroyed, but the club’s 1,761-square-foot Foster Lodge was unscathed.

The two wooden structures were built in 1927 by San Diego banker Edward Tyndal Guymon for his family, then sold to the Sierra Club chapter in 1951 for $10, club committee chairman Richard Miller said Tuesday.

“A lot of people have celebrated birthdays, anniversaries there. We use it for a lot of events,” Miller said. “We sent a notice to our membership saying the lodge is closed until further notice. We’re waiting for the ability to get up there and assess the damage.”

Another club committee chairman, Bill Powers, said the club will seek national historic designation for Foster Lodge.

“It’s a miracle that Foster Lodge is still there,” Powers said, adding that club members last week had cut grass and brush around it — to prepare for fire season. “We can rebuild the cabin as a model of sustainability. A Phoenix shall rise from those ashes.”

At the Shriners camp, more than 100 buildings were lost to the fire at a site that the charity has leased from the U.S. Forest Service since 1921.

“In all that’s burned up on this mountain in a hundred years, this camp was never touched,” said Wierman, a former potentate of Shriners International and a member of the group’s Los Angeles Hospital Board of Governors.

On Tuesday, he was at the camp with his son-in-law, Seth Parker, who was married at the lodge not long ago. Parker said his wife had dreams of their 18-month-old daughter dancing at her own wedding in the lodge.

The lodge’s stone fireplace survived, with two andirons in the shape of the Shriners’ logo. Parker and a friend took away the andirons.

Wierman said about 17 of the burned cabins were wooden. The rest were 1950s trailers that had been covered over and added on to.

On Sunday morning, the day after the Chariot fire started southeast of Julian, about 25 people were still at the Shriners camp, including Wierman. They were feeding firefighters at the dining hall.

Wierman said a group of Shriners were at what was known as Al’s Bar, in a corner of the lodge.

“We were sitting there as survivors of the great Chariot fire,” he said. “We bragged too soon.”